Pope wraps up historic trip with Copacabana Mass
From The New Age
Pope Francis wrapped up a historic trip to his home continent Sunday with a Mass on Copacabana beach that drew a reported 3 million people, who cheered the first Latin American pope in a remarkable response to his message that the Catholic Church must shake itself up and get out into the streets to find the faithful.
Nearly the entire 4 kilometer (2.5 mile) crescent of Copacabana’s broad beach overflowed with people, some of them taking an early morning dip in the Atlantic and others tossing t-shirts, flags and soccer jerseys into the pontiff’s open-sided car as he drove by.
Francis worked the crowd, kissing babies, taking a sip of mate tea handed up to him and catching gifts on the fly. Even the normally stern-faced Vatican bodyguards let smiles slip as they jogged alongside his car, caught up in the enthusiasm of the crowd.
Many of the crowd had spent the night on the beach, an all-night slumber party to end World Youth Day that had a festive Latin air, with pilgrims wrapped in flags and sleeping bags to ward off the cold. They danced, prayed and sang – and stood in long lines in front of the armadas of portable bathrooms along the beachfront.
“We were dying of cold but it was worth it,” said Lucrecia Grillera, an 18-year-old from Cordoba, Argentina, where Francis lived for a time before becoming pope. “It was a tiring day, but it was a great experience.”
The Vatican said more than 3 million people were on hand for the Mass, based on information from World Youth Day organizers and local authorities.
That was far higher than the 1 million at the last World Youth Day vigil in Madrid in 2011 or the 650,000 at Toronto’s 2002 vigil.
Many of those at the vigil had tears in their eyes as they listened to Francis’ call for them to not be “part-time Christians” and to build up their church like his namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, was called to do.
“Jesus offers us something bigger than the World Cup!” Francis said, drawing cheers from the crowd in this soccer-mad nation.
After Sunday’s Mass, Francis was meeting with the bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as holding a thank-you audience with some of the 60,000 volunteers who organized the youth festival. He was leaving for Rome Sunday night.
“It was such an excellent week, everybody was in such good spirit, you could just feel a sense of peace,” said Denise da Silva, a Rio de Janeiro Catholic who was sitting alone on the beach Sunday morning, a Brazilian flag painted on her face. “I have never seen something here in Rio so marvelous as what we have just lived.”
Saturday night’s vigil capped a busy day for the pope in which he drove home a message he has emphasized throughout the week in speeches, homilies and off-the-cuff remarks: the need for Catholics, lay and religious, to shake up the status quo, get out of their stuffy sacristies and reach the faithful on the margins of society or risk losing them to rival churches.
In the longest and most important speech of his four-month pontificate, Francis took a direct swipe at the “intellectual” message of the church that so characterized the pontificate of his predecessor, Benedict XVI. Speaking to Brazil’s bishops, he said ordinary Catholics simply don’t understand such lofty ideas and need to hear the simpler message of love, forgiveness and mercy that is at the core of the Catholic faith.
“At times we lose people because they don’t understand what we are saying, because we have forgotten the language of simplicity and import an intellectualism foreign to our people,” he said. “Without the grammar of simplicity, the church loses the very conditions which make it possible to fish for God in the deep waters of his mystery.”
In a speech outlining the kind of church he wants, Francis asked bishops to reflect on why hundreds of thousands of Catholics have left the church for Protestant and Pentecostal congregations that have grown exponentially in recent decades in Brazil, particularly in its slums or favelas, where their charismatic message and nuts-and-bolts advice is welcome by the poor.
According to census data, the number of Catholics in Brazil dipped from 125 million in 2000 to 123 million in 2010, with the church’s share of the total population dropping from 74 percent to 65 percent. During the same time period, the number of evangelical Protestants and Pentecostals skyrocketed from 26 million to 42 million, increasing from 15 percent to 22 percent of the population in 2010.
Francis offered a breathtakingly blunt list of explanations for the “exodus.”
“Perhaps the church appeared too weak, perhaps too distant from their needs, perhaps too poor to respond to their concerns, perhaps too cold, perhaps too caught up with itself, perhaps a prisoner of its own rigid formulas,” he said. “Perhaps the world seems to have made the church a relic of the past, unfit for new questions. Perhaps the church could speak to people in their infancy but not to those come of age.”
Francis asked if the church today can still “warm the hearts” of its faithful with priests who take time to listen to their problems and remain close to them.
“We need a church capable of rediscovering the maternal womb of mercy,” he said. “Without mercy, we have little chance nowadays of becoming part of a world of ‘wounded’ persons in need of understanding, forgiveness and love.”
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Pope Francis gives candid speech on ‘exodus’ of followers from the Catholic Church
By Philip Pullella, Reuters From Business Insider
RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – Pope Francis, in a stunningly candid assessment of the state of the Catholic Church, said on Saturday it should look in the mirror and ask why so many people are leaving the faith of their fathers.
On the penultimate day of his trip to Brazil, Francis delivered a long address to the country’s bishops in which he suggested elements of what could become a blueprint for stopping what he called an “exodus.”
“I would like all of us to ask ourselves today: are we still a Church capable of warming hearts?” he said in a speech remarkable for its frankness about the hemorrhaging of the Church in many countries.
The Argentine pope, who is in Rio for a Catholic international jamboree known as World Youth Day, referred to what he called “the mystery of those who leave the Church” because they think it “can no longer offer them anything meaningful or important.”
The Church has been losing members throughout the world to secularism and to other religions, including in Latin America, where evangelical groups have won over many converts.
He acknowledged that many people see the Church as a “relic of the past,” too caught up in itself, and a “prisoner of its own rigid formulas.”
While he said the Church “must remain faithful” to its religious doctrine, it had to be closer to the people and their real problems.
“Today, we need a Church capable of walking at people’s side, of doing more than simply listening to them,” he said.
“At times we lose people because they don’t understand what we are saying, because we have forgotten the language of simplicity and import an intellectualism foreign to our people,” he said.
In Brazil, the number of Catholics has dwindled rapidly in the decades since its once-rural population moved increasingly to major cities, where modern consumer culture has overtaken more provincial mores and where Protestant denominations, aggressively courting followers in urban outskirts and shantytowns, have won many converts.
“We need a Church capable of restoring citizenship to her many children who are journeying, as it were, in an exodus,” he said.
The address to the bishops complemented an earlier homily in Rio’s cathedral, where he urged priests worldwide to leave their comfortable surroundings to go out and serve the poor and needy.
“We cannot keep ourselves shut up in parishes, in our communities, when so many people are waiting for the Gospel,” he said in the sermon of a Mass in Rio’s cathedral.
Since his election in March as the first non-European pope in 1,300 years, Francis has been prodding priests, nuns and bishops to think less about their careers in the Church and listen more to the cries of those who are hungry to fill both material and spiritual needs.
“It is not enough simply to open the door in welcome, but we must go out through that door and meet the people!” he said.
‘SLUM CARDINAL’
Known as the “slum cardinal” in his native Argentina because of his austere lifestyle and visits to poor areas, Francis made a clarion call to clergy to take risks and go out among the faithful who need them most.
“It is in the ‘favelas’ and ‘villas miseria’ that one must go to seek and to serve Christ,” he said, quoting the late Mother Teresa of Calcutta and using the terms used in Brazil and Argentina for shantytowns.
Francis has set a new tone in the Vatican, rejecting the lush papal residence his predecessors used in the Apostolic Palace and living instead in a small suite in a Vatican guest house, and often eating in the common dining room.
The pope spoke as hundreds of thousands of young people were converging on Rio’s famed Copacabana beach for an all night prayer vigil ahead of concluding ceremonies on Sunday, when he returns to Rome.
Earlier, in a talk at Rio’s theater, he said leaders must address the issues raised in protests in Brazil, saying dialogue was the only way to resolve the issues.
Latin America’s largest nation has been rocked by protests against corruption, the misuse of public money and the high cost of living. Most of the protesters are young.
He urged leaders not to remain deaf to “the outcry, the call for justice (that) continues to be heard even today” and, in an apparent reference to corruption, spoke of “the task of rehabilitating politics.”
(Additional reporting by Esteban Israel in Sao Paolo; Editing by Vicki Allen)
PHOTO: REUTERS/Tony Gentile
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